Corruption rampant in Zimbabwe

By David Pallister

LONDON: The head of the armed forces in Zimbabwe is a director of a private company dealing in the mining and trading of gold and diamonds, ostensibly to finance the war effort in the north which is supplied by the general's transport firm.

Another director is the defense ministry permanent secretary whose other benefits include a lease on an 800,000-acre state farm for about US$1.58 a year.

The agriculture minister has been charged under the Prevention of Corruption Act with taking $5.5m from public funds and is out on bail. Two other permanent secretaries and the former head of the national oil company are under investigation for fraud.

The head of state's nephew represented a consortium which dubiously won the $2.4m contract to build the capital's new international airport.

His brother-in-law received a record $22,000 payout from the fund for war veterans which has been plundered by members of the ruling elite. A judicial commission alleged that many of the claims were fraudulent.

His young wife, a serious shopaholic, took $158,000 to build a mansion from a public housing scheme. Two years ago, without being lived in, it was put on the market for more than $632,000.

Welcome to Zimbabwe. In the scale of African profiteering, this is small beer, partly because the country does not have the sort of riches that encourage massive illegal expropriation.

In Transparency International's index of perceived corruption, Zimbabwe ranks around the middle of 99 nations, along with Brazil, Morocco and Malawi.

Despite calls for the investigation and freezing of Mugabe's personal assets held abroad, most observers believe that the teetotal and, even at 76, fitness-fanatic president is more interested in clinging on to power than in lining his pocket.

He hasn't even been able to buy a presidential jet, though he can commandeer planes from the national airline.

While ordinary Zimbabweans are convinced that he has the mandatory Swiss bank account, most observers are convinced that he cannot match the cupidity of Nigeria's Abacha or Zaire's Mobutu.

The same cannot be said of those who surround him, though it would be an heroic senior civil servant or general in most African countries who denied himself the opportunities to get rich while in office.

The problem for Mugabe is the perception -- in a highly literate population -- that he has done very little about reining in the excesses of his family and party cronies.

John Makumbe, an academic critic at Harare University, says: "Experience has taught Zimbabweans that the (ruling) Zanu-PF government is very good at setting up all manner of schemes, funds and programs to benefit the poor and the needy. But soon after gathering the money, it loots everything with impunity for the benefit of big chiefs."

After 20 years in power, it was only this month that the constitution was changed to provide for an anti-corruption commission and the fraud squad started to make some very high level arrests of officials and executives in key state organizations.

In a country that ranks 130 out of 174 in the United Nations human development index, and where life expectancy has dropped to an alarming 44 years -- due to the Aids crisis -- the flagrant abuse of state funds has become a critical election issue.

Last July, Mugabe publicly recognized the problems with this admonition to his cabinet about the way contracts are awarded. "I know they are buying you for tenders and that some of you are accepting huge bribes, but can you have the courage to say to them you've lost the tender at the end of the day?"

The most serious scandal since independence in 1980 concerned the war veterans fund -- compensation for the very people that Mugabe is now using as his political stormtroopers.

Gen. Vitalis Zvinavashe, the army commander now in private business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where 11,000 Zimbabwean troops are based, claimed 55 percent disability. Police commissioner Augustine Chihuri petitioned for 20 percent and his deputy Godwin Matanga for 92 percent.

The opposition MP Margaret Dongo said: "There are so many cabinet members, army officers and police officers who are claiming funds for serious disabilities, it is a wonder the government can function at all."

Judge Chidyauysiku, who conducted an investigation into the scandal, just managed to keep his sense of humor. Confronted by a 92 percent disability claim from a former Zanu-PF MP of considerable girth, he remarked laconically: "I see here that one of your claims was for loss of appetite."

The ordinary veterans lost out, too, on the distribution of state-owned tenant and commercials farms. But Zimbabwe's democratic process, however skewed, does allow light to be shed on these matters.

It was Mrs Dongo, the president of the Zimbabwe Union of Democrats, who asked for and was given a list of all farms leased out since 1990. Recipients of government munificence include the attorney general, the cabinet secretary, several civil servants and prominent business people.

Transparency does not exist, however, in Zimbabwe's 20-month involvement in the DRC in support of President Kabila against the Uganda and Rwanda-backed rebels.

Mugabe's government has urged local business to take advantage of the economic opportunities in minerals- rich Congo, and his senior people have been enthusiastically showing the way to pay for a war costing up to $95,000 a day.

Besides Gen. Zvinavashe's gold and diamond company, Olseg Private Limited, which is a joint venture with a company owned by the Congolese military, Zimbabwe also has an interest in the DRC's other main asset, the cobalt and copper mining enterprise, Gecamines.

For a year until last November, the chairman of Gecamines was the South African-based Zimbabwean entrepreneur Billy Rautenbach, introduced to Kabila by Mugabe's right-hand man and principal deal- maker, the justice minister Emerson Mnangagwa.

For reasons that are still unclear, Kabila sacked Rautenbach last November just as he was placed under investigation in Johannesburg for fraud, tax evasion and alleged involvement with organized crime.

Last September, the Zimbabwean magazine Legal Forum described the country as a "racketeering state" characterized by minimal economic development, stagnation leading to recession and unbridled greed by the ruling elite.

Little wonder that President Mugabe and his friends are not keen to take a rest.

-- Guardian News Service